IT Channel Insight has published its first-ever Cloud Leaders Report, with views of cloud service leaders, including Google, Microsoft, IBM, HP, VMWare, Asigra and Salesforce.com among others.
“We were never happy with sitting back and watching the computing world go by, so we thought we’d get all the information we could about the current state and the future of cloud computing and present it to you,” the website explained.
IT Channel Insight acts as a one-stop source of information for IT resellers, managed service providers and channel partners.
The IT world is moving solutions to the cloud at an unprecedented rate. Any service which can be hosted is being offered in the cloud. And customers are picking it up – Gartner estimates that public cloud expenditure will grow by 41 per cent to hit $206 billion in 2016.
IT Channel Insight interviewed people from the companies shaping the industry: Asigra, Axcient, CA Technologies, Citrix, Dell, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Rackspace, Red Hat, Salesforce, Shoretel, StorageCraft, Symantec and VMware.
The cloud market is now made up of a healthy mix of start-ups which made their name in cloud computing and IT giants who are shifting a significant portion of their business from on-premise to the cloud.
Nevertheless, the vast majority of respondents (81 per cent) do not believe that on-premise software vendors should shift their overall strategy to cloud, leading us to assume that those companies which were made by selling on-premise software still see cloud as a great addition to the portfolio rather than a replacement.
The benefits of switching from offering on-premise solutions to cloud services are relatively obvious. Even though the revenue up-front is generally lower, by shifting a client from a product to a service, the total income over the lifetime is higher (as long as the service offered is good and you can keep the client). Economies of scale mean that in most cases the total cost of ownership for the end-user is lower too, so practically everybody wins.
Cloud services also offer quasi-guaranteed recurring revenue, giving steady income and making financial projections much easier in the process.
When asked about the most important aspects of being leaders in cloud computing, most vendors seemed to agree that innovation is the most crucial aspect of being an industry leader. A third, however, mentioned channel partners as being essential to long-term success.
The report is available at http://itchannelinsight.com/